MovieChat Forums > Kôkaku kidôtai: Stand Alone Complex (2004) Discussion > Why Didn't the Makers Keep the Same Styl...

Why Didn't the Makers Keep the Same Style as the Films?


It's like taking a step back from everything Mamoru Oshii did to improve Ghost in the Shell. I know its more like the manga but the films really improve on the manga.

"Be it a rock or a grain of sand, in water they sink as the same." Lee Woo-jin (Oldboy)

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I'm forced to assume you're referring to the artistic style of the series versus the movie since "style" is a VERY broad term. There are a lot of plausible answers to your question.

1) It could have been costs of production. Even if the film and the series had the same production budget, you've got 1 movie that lasts an hour and a half compared to 26 (and then another 26) half hour episodes to split resources intended to produce one whole product. Ink, paint, studio time, post-production, labor... all those things cost money, and it might not have been economically feasible to pour the same amount of resources into every episode that they did for the movies.

2) There was a change in art directors. That's the person who really decides the majority of the visual element of an animated series.

3) It's called stand-alone for a reason. It's not connected to the movies. Perhaps a starkly different visual style was called for to prevent any sort of confusion.

4) The original movie was produced in 1994-1995. Animation technology has advanced remarkably since then, as have the typical anime art styles. I tend to think that fewer people would watch a new series that looks exactly like something that came out seven or eight years prior. I think it would be sort of an unconscious bias against it because it would look so dated.

5) Mamoru Oshii wasn't the screenwriter for either season, nor was he the director. That could have been a conscious choice on the part of the production committee. They obviously wanted something new that would appeal to the general masses more than a lot of Oshii's pseudo-philosophical work.

As an aside, I happen to like the series more than the movies. I think both are great work, but I think the series is superior. That's not to say your opinion isn't valid, I'm merely expressing mine. The characters are more fleshed out in the series. It has more of a sense of humor. It's much less dark, and far more colorful; you can actually the nuances in the animators' work thanks to that.

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It's called stand-alone for a reason. It's not connected to the movies. Perhaps a starkly different visual style was called for to prevent any sort of confusion.


I was under the impression that it was called "stand alone" because each episode stands alone. There is a different story in each episode(Which I abhor by the way).

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Not to sound like a jerk or anything, because I don't mean this as an insult: have you watched the entire series?

Each episode DOESN'T stand alone. There is an over-arching plot that serves as the dominant theme for more than half of the episodes in each season. In fact, not even every episode is entirely self-contained. For example (and this is but one of many I could cite for you), the fourth through sixth episodes of the first season are one continuous mini-story arc.

Granted that the two seasons have different "types" of episodes ("stand alone" and "complex" for the first season; "dividual" and "individual" for the second), which may have thrown you off. You'll notice that the "stand alone" episodes and "individual" episodes in their respective seasons, while focusing mainly on whichever character or subject happens to be the focus of that episode, also touch on issues that pertain to the entire seasons' plots.



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I have watched quite a few episodes and there were a great number of episodes that introduced and explained an entire story that had nothing to do with a definitive arc. The entire season plot trudges along with episodes that sparingly add anything to it. I would compare it to Cowboy Bebop. Is it a continuing arc? Yeah in the sense that they present a question at the beginning of the series, then halfway through the series they add to that question, then at the end they answer it. All the while you have episodes in between that add nothing to the original question only sprinkled with some character development(which I like) in between. I guess this format is ok I am just not used to it.

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ehm, "Stand alone complex" is a concept Shirow came up with, the theory is similar to meme's, a sorta copycat behavior, its discussed thoroughly in the last episode.
And is the main theme in the series.

The concept is met again with the "individual eleven" group.

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Actually it's not a concept the Shirow came up with. It's an actual psycho-sociological phenomenon, though it's more commonly called "2nd order simulacra." He simply adapted it to his own purposes using an easier to grasp alternative name for it.

Because everything Shirow does in his work usually has dual intended meanings, I tend to think that choice in title was a concerted effort to delineate the movies (his original continuity) from the new continuity by employing that simpler term. It's if to say "this series stands alone from the movies."

I was simply trying to highlight that fact, though it seems I was less than clear with that point.

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I for one didn't think the movies improved on the Manga, at all. I was pleased when I first saw the new style.

Regardless, it's probably cheaper to animate. (On that note, one thing that bothers me is the number of still shots they use...I realize they pour a lot of the savings from that into the action scenes, but there has got to be a way to make it less blatant)

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Actually, I think they use a lot of those still shots to make it easier to dub into other languages.

The translation screenwriter/localization editor is able to write dialogue that's closer to the original script if they don't have to worry about trying to match syllables of speech by the actors with the number of syllables mouthed by the characters on-screen.

As an example, say you have a phrase that has seven syllables in Japanese, but only four in English. Using a still shot allows the English version writer to use a more accurate translation as opposed to throwing extra words in there just to make the spoken and visual dialogue match-up. Or if the Japanese phrase has fewer syllables than its English equivalent, you'll end up with words being spoken by characters whose mouths are closed. In a series such as this, where technical terms abound, using still shots, and framing shots so that the mouths aren't visible make it much easier to write an accurate English script.

Otherwise you end up with an anime that looks like a bad Godzilla movie. If you've ever watched Speed Racer, you what I'm talking about.

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"Actually, I think they use a lot of those still shots to make it easier to dub into other languages. "

If it is, they sure aren't taking advantage of it. There are multiple instances where they maintained the same pauses as in the Japanese (which sound awkward in English) even though there was no motion in the scene.

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That's not the animator's fault, that's a choice the voice actor and ADR director. They picked (and rightfully so in my opinion) to place acting performance over a split-second of audio-video being out of sync.

Otherwise, I think you're nit-picking a little too much. I have watched both seasons at least four times, and I can only think of two examples of what you're talking about off the top of my head. But even if there are "multiple instances" that I subconsciously overlooked, think about the number of lines of dialogue in relation to the number of little mistakes like that. I'd say they're still at least 90 percent sucessful.

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You misunderstand. They make sure that the audio and video sync, to the detriment of the dialog in English, due to the fact that Japanese paces certain things differently, and due to its different sentence structure, can place things after a pause which can only be in the middle of a sentence in English. They do this to make the dialog in English always have something speaking when a character's mouth is moving.

But then they go further and continue to match the pacing of the Japanese dialogue EVEN IN SCENES WHERE THERE IS NO MOUTH MOVEMENT ON SCREEN.

I'd have to watch both series again to find the exact moment I've got in mind, but it was one where no one was moving, and there was a piece of dialog that had a really awkward pause before the end of a sentence.

This sentence was one that in Japanese, would have been able to have that pause WITHOUT being awkward.

It was just the one time that I recall it being REALLY blatant, but they regularly sacrifice the quality of the English rather than letting a mouth movement be unvoiced, or going in with Photoshop or something and removing that mouth movement.

I've got to wonder if they're even watching the thing, or if they just match the timing up to the japanese audio, disregarding the video. (That would certainly make things easier, I think)

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Well, I actually think the animation in the series is terrific and for me, the still shots and slow swooping pans across the screen are indicative of the style of anime, for me it's very beautiful, really capturing the cyberpunk aesthetic of the Japanese future.

However, the conflicting styles of the two movies is another thing. Granted, the original movie was made in the mid-nineties and as such, the animation reflects this, but they chose to stay true to it's cyberpunk roots with the futuristic vehicles, gadgets etc. GITS: SAC has a much more contemporary feel, more of a natural progression of the future, aside from the cybernetics and the giant robots of various types it feels like a world I could envision myself living in sometime in the future.

As for the second movie, Innocence, Oshii seemed to make a very strange choice artistically, moving from cyberpunk to a throwback to 40's/50's noir, suddenly all the vehicles on the road are retrofit American sedans, the costumes, interiors all suggest we're in this time period, only the constant presence of cyborgs and the net reaffirms that this is actually the future. I thought it was odd for Oshii to make such a dramatic u-turn with the style, for me Innocence looks more hi-tech (the graphics, interfaces etc) but fundamentally appears to be a throwback to classic noir and I wonder why Oshii decided on this stylistic decision. After all, the second movie only takes place 3 years after the first, so there is no way that the styles and consumer attitudes could change so dramatically in such a short space of time. I would say Oshii simply wanted to try a new approach and used creative license to get around the apparent inconsistencies between the two films, but although I enjoyed this second outing for GITS, I found these artistic choices to be somewhat distracting and not altogether succesful.

"WHOA, WHOA, WHOA, WHOA, WHOA, WHOA... Lois, this is not my Batman glass."

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